User Advice Needed - Restructure Expense Accounts

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:28 AM, ThreeDot<matt.schnepf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Question: When I started using GnuCash I was a W2 employee and my accounting
> was entirely personal. Two years ago I started my own business (a single
> proprietor LLC) and continued to use my preexisting GnuCash accounts. I
> would like to restructure my income and expense accounts to better reflect
> personal vs. business accounting. What is the best way to do this? Do I just
> create a new file and copy balances and transactions since January 1, 2009?

You could create a new file as you describe, but it may not be
necessary. You will want to discuss this with your accountant based on
your personal situation.

What I have done is create additional business accounts in my personal
data file to keep up with the expenses for my personal business. When
I take the printouts to my accountant every year, she has been VERY
happy to see the categorized and itemized reports (instead of a
shoebox full of receipts, I presume). Because you have gone to the
trouble to create an LLC your accountant may advise you to keep the
personal and business accounts entirely separate, but if you tend to
intermingle your personal and business work throughout the day it may
be cumbersome.

In my case, part of my business involves managing the books for
several different entities. I created totally separate books for each
other business. SO when I am processing data for the businesses I
manage, I open an entirely separate GnuCash data file for each of
those businesses' accounts. You can open multiple data files at the
same time if you use the command line (or a launcher that issues the
command).

It would be nice to "link" the accounts. For example when I use my
credit card to buy hardware store items for one of the businesses I
manage, I key the credit card transaction into my personal GnuCash
account and I enter it as an expense of my management business, and
then I must ALSO separately enter it as a liability in the separate
business account. Resolving them may involve writing myself a check or
keeping up with the expenses for a future combined reimbursement, but
whatever I do, there will again be two separate transactions to settle
them.

I would love to be able to export transactions from one GnuCash file's
particular account and then import the transactions into another
GnuCash file, using the existing QIF / QFX / OFX import process to
check for duplicates and distribute the transactions into the proper
accounts. I am sure this is TECHNICALLY feasible, but my experiments
using the various export utilities have not been very satisfactory
yet.

P.S.: I want to create a special .scm report file that creates QIF /
QFX / OFX or spreadsheet data from within GnuCash INSTEAD OF relying
on one of the external utilities listed in the FAQ.
     http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Importing.2FExporting_Data

The model I have is the existing "Tax Report & TXF Export" report. If
anyone has worked on a similar report I would love to see your notes.